Last Updated: 2024-02-11

OpenPort25 LLC, allow customers (“you”, “your”) to engage only in lawful, consent-based marketing practices on OpenPort25’s platform. Emails sent on our platform must be requested, anticipated, personal and relevant. We do not allow unsolicited commercial emails or use of purchased lists of recipients who have not consented to receive emails from the customer. Our customers’ email practices must also comply with all applicable legal requirements in the jurisdictions where their email recipients reside.

This policy explains OpenPort25’s (“we”, “us”, “our”) anti-spam requirements for using our platform. By using our servers, you agree to abide by this policy. These rules are not exhaustive and we reserve the right to suspend or terminate your server/account for any conduct that we in our sole discretion determine may negatively affect our platform, our customers, consumers, or our business.

Customers’ Responsibilities

To use OpenPort25’s Platform, customers must:

• Abide by the Terms of Service and this Anti-Spam Policy.
• Comply with the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003 (“CAN-SPAM”).
• Determine whether any additional anti-spam or data protection laws apply to the customer — including based on the country where you do business or where your business and/or your email recipients are located — and comply with those laws.

Consent Requirements

All recipients of communications sent using the Service must have provided consent to receive the email from you prior to receiving any email via the OpenPort25 platform. Consent must be:

• Conspicuous: The consent must be clearly presented to the individual and cannot be embedded in terms of privacy policies.
• Explicit: Prospective recipients may be presented with check a box to receive email communications from the customer (which may be pre-checked) or acknowledge a specific call to action by other means, such as typing in their email address in response to an offer to receive emails from the customer. OpenPort25 products enable customers to put an opt-in form on their website. This feature collects and stores email addresses of permission-based recipients.
• Transparent: The recipient must be told what kind of communications they will receive, for what purpose, and from whom, so that the emails are requested, anticipated, personal and relevant to the recipients.
• Authenticated via Closed Loop: After consenting, recipients must promptly receive an email confirming their agreement to receive future communications. Recipients must reply to that email, which has the effect of confirming the consent.
• Verifiable: You must be able to provide verification of consent either by maintaining logs of consents or establishing that your processes are built to require and obtain consent (e.g., that you build your contact list exclusively by using data collection forms with a built-in email marketing consent).

Prohibition on Purchased Lists

We do not allow any form of purchased, rented, or borrowed lists of recipients, except where each individual on the list consented to receive marketing emails from you. You may not use the platform to contact recipients who have not independently provided valid, documented consent.

Compliance with CAN-SPAM

All communications sent using the OpenPort25 platform must comply with CAN-SPAM. The following is a non-exhaustive list of CAN-SPAM requirements:

• Providing Unsubscribe Choice: We automatically add an unsubscribe option to all emails sent using the platform. The unsubscribe option can be used either (1) via a link in each email, or (2) by replying to an email from the platform with “unsubscribe” in the Subject line. The unsubscribe option cannot be removed by the sender; however, you may choose how the unsubscribe will be phrased. Anyone who unsubscribes will be automatically flagged in the database, and their email address will be suppressed from all future mailings. Unsubscribe status can’t be overwritten by list merging.
• Clear Header Information: The “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information in the email header – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who is the “sender” of the communication.
• Accurate Address Information: Communications must include your valid physical postal address. This can be a current street address, a post office box registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.

Software Control and Abuse Prevention Tools

Contact List Abuse Prevention: Our contact list hygiene system uses sophisticated algorithms to assess the probability that a list does not use closed-loop authentication. We will lock any list that fails the hygiene system test.

We automatically screen email campaigns for indicators of potential problems such as campaign size, billing plan selected, IP address of user, time between account creation and campaign scheduling, multiple credit card refusals, and user profile information (i.e., email address used, and specific words used in the subject or content of the campaign). Any email campaign that surpasses a threshold is held until the postmaster reviews and clears it. To protect our reputation, and that of our customers, we offer to help new customers upload their first large email distribution list. This allows us to view the contents of an email distribution list, with the customer’s permission. In addition, we help first time customers run a sample email campaign to a few select recipients from their list before sending to the rest.

As customers use our platform, the number of complaints they receive is tracked by an internal reputation system. Customers with a low number of complaints are not subject to the early warning monitoring or list upload restrictions. Larger lists shall not be uploaded by the customer with high number of complaints; rather, OpenPort25 will upload the list upon the customer’s instruction, and we will subject such lists to manual scrutiny.

Recipient Confidentiality: To further protect recipients from email abuse, recipients receiving email sent using the Service will only see their own names in the “To” field. No other recipients’ email addresses are visible.

Email Sending Practices

OpenPort25 honors ISP policies (including, but not limited to, restrictions on number of connections, size of pipe, speed of sending servers, open relay off, reverse DNS enabled, RFC compliance). Authentication standards, such as sender policy framework (SPF), are used for outgoing email campaigns. OpenPort25 products distinguish between soft and hard bounces. Hard bounces are immediately flagged and suppressed from future mailings.

Complaint Resolution

When we receive a complaint, we follow the following process:

1. Every complaint that is received is reviewed by our postmaster.
2. If the email address of the complainant is known, it will be immediately unsubscribed from the relevant customer list.
3. If the email address of the complainant is known, the complainant will be notified that their email address has been removed. If the complaint came via an ISP, the ISP will also be notified of the action taken.
4. The postmaster will lock the list and review the list with the relevant customer. We may terminate customer accounts entirely based on complaints or other conduct that we in our sole discretion determine may negatively affect our platform, our customers, consumers, or our business.

OpenPort25’s reserves the right to share the offending customer’s name and the fact that there have been complaints with any third party, including other providers of email services that the customer may use.

If you believe that a OpenPort25’s customer has sent emails on our platform in violation of this policy, please contact us at postmaster@openport25.com.